Conscious Leadership By Mackey and Sisodia
Explain the characteristics of conscious leadership as defined by Mackey and Sisodia and compare them to the primary characteristics of two or three other leadership theories you have studied.
Solution
Conscious Leadership According to Mackey and Sisodia, conscious leadership is an essential element in conscious capitalism for its impact on corporate progression or regression. They described conscious leaders in their book of Conscious Capitalism as those influential individuals with outstanding moral courage. They can withstand constant scrutiny and criticism from those who view a business more traditionally and narrowly.
They are mature emotionally and spiritually, motivated by the higher purposes of serving the company and its stakeholders, not by personal enrichment. They find beauty and joy in what they do, which helps shape a better future. They are the trustees of the business who strive to motivate, inspire, develop, and lead by example.
They are also servant-leadership-oriented and have a high capacity for love and care. They are authentic and well-oriented to their potential, motivations, values, and principles. (Mackey, J., & Sisodia, R., 2014). Comparison between Conscious Leadership and Other Leadership Theories Unlike conscious leaders who inspire, empower, and develop their workers, transactional leaders believe in contractual agreements as principal motivators and use contingent rewards to achieve results and enhance followers’ motivation. They manage by exception by focusing on specific business areas and not the whole business; they only focus on the areas with significant discrepancies from the standard.
They are considered efficient and save time by either trusting their workers to get the job done and being content with only monitoring their performance or waiting for things to go wrong before they interfere. This leadership style suppresses creativity and can negatively influence employees’ job satisfaction. (Avolio & Bass, 1997).Transformational leaders motivate and empower their followers based on shared values and goals, and their focus to inspire and engage them is mainly to meet organizational goals. (Khan, Z., 2016). Conscious leaders have an orientation toward servant leadership and put their workers’ needs first. Servant leaders are known for their ethical qualities, which include listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community (Gandolfi et al., 2017). These qualities are in line with those of conscious leaders. The importance of self-awareness, self-concept, and emotional intelligence in enabling effective conscious leadership Perception and awareness of the self-concept, which is one of the core dimensions of emotional intelligence, is an ongoing process and not just a one-off assessment. We live in a very dynamic world where we interact with different groups of people and individuals and react to specific influences and stressors differently. Our values and life goals are changeable and prone to be reordered and reprioritized based on many social, environmental, and personal factors.
